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How To Make Blogging More SemWeb Friendly

After thinking about this for a little while, and with the discussions on this blog, I offer some suggestions to make blogs more friendly and useful to the semantic web.

Put triples describing comments and comment authors inside RSS - This would help with the comment spam problem and start to build a web of trust wrt posting to blogs. Movable Type's TypeKey system solves the authentication problem. By finding triples of the blog comments, I feel we can help with the second level to the problem: authorization.

RSS feeds should populate dc:references with URIs used in blog entry body - Typically, blog entries include one or more URIs in the body of the entry. By making those URIs explicitly available via triples inside the RSS, more accurate and interesting information becomes available. Specifically, the question of "What are people blogging about?" becomes easier to answer.

Encourage Blog authors to include dc:subject, and help define what might go in there - By starting to label blog entries with information on their subject (what the entry might be about), ad hoc planet* sites can be built. These planet* sites scan all the RSS looking for entries about particular subject matters and aggregate the entries. For this to work, there would be a way for an aggregator to declare a mapping between the values of dc:subject found in the wild, and the recognized values of the aggregator (OWL helps here a lot).

In which I port a snazzy little JavaScript audio web app to Dart, discover a bug, and high-five type annotations. Here's what I learned.

[As it says in the header of this blog, I'm a seasoned Dart developer. However, I certainly don't write Dart every day (I wish!). Don't interpret this post as "Hi, I'm new to Dart". Instead, interpret this post as "I'm applying what I've been documenting."]

This post analyzes two versions of the same app, both the original (JavaScript) version and the Dart version. The original version is a proxy for any small JavaScript app, there's nothing particularly special about the original version, which is why it made for a good example.

Warning: We expect the Dart libraries to undergo potentially sweeping changes before Dart goes to alpha. This document is relevant as of 2011-12-22.

Intro

Dart is a "batteries included" effort to help app developers build modern web apps. An important "battery" is the bundled core Dart libraries, providing common and rich functionality. Dart is building a solution for large, complex web apps, and providing well tested, integrated, and common libraries is key to helping a web app developer be more productive out of the box.

The Collection libraries are a crucial set of APIs that Dart developers get for free. Much more than simple arrays and maps, the Collection library includes standard ways to filter, iterate, inspect, compose, and sort your data. This post specifically looks at List<E>, Dart's ordered, indexable collection of objects.